>>100690605
Dunno, I haven't looked at them since they first started years ago. I just learned and practiced some hiragana and katakana and just found words and phrases popular enough to fuck around with my friends.

>>100690403>learn nip only to read something made mostly for teens>not learning the greatest language that ever existed and reading scientific works, documents, books etc. in latin
And if you say to someone that you learned japanese to read manga, they'll call you a weeb fag, tell them you know latin and read Newton's works in it's original language and you wake up with two girls in you bed.

>>100690992
Almost all Japanese you'll see in manga and the like is over 50% hiragana. Even news usually have at least 30% of hiragana. If you see a wall of Kanji you're most likely looking at Chinese.

I might as well ask this here:
Assuming you study Anki diligently, how long would it take to acquire enough knowledge of the language to read, say, the average doujin on ExHentai with minimal dictionary use?

I know English, Spanish, French, and a little Portuguese, but I only self-taught the Portuguese, which was piss easy.

>>100691814
Anonymous, please. Lots of people learn Latin nowadays, interestingly even in the USA, and even if it were dead, the canon of Latin literature is more worthwile than what the still living, declining Japanese language can offer nowadays.

>build confidence after easily learning hiragana and katakana>start on kanji today>instantly feel like I've lost all grasp on language>everything is overwhelming and full of terminology I don't understand

>>100691798
The writing system is the easiest part of Japanese because of Kanji. Once you learn Kanji Japanese is very easy to decipher. The spoken language is much more difficult because of all the homophones. You have to pay attention to the context, it's not like the written language where you can quickly skim for kanji and instantly derive the gist of a sentence before digging in for nuance.

>>100691907
The order of structuring your very thoughts to form a proper sentence is entirely different, and the way you talk about kanji is reminiscent of newfags in the DJT. Not saying it's extremely difficult, but the type of challenges it presents are far greater than trying to learn any indo-european language regardless of distance from your own.

>>100692141>Live on an isolated island >Inherit a whole bunch of characters which are incompatible with your spoken language>Fit those round pegs into square holes for two thousand years because kids can pick up any esoteric language>Have such a retarded oral language that romanji would literally produce thousands upon thousands of homophones.

>>100692254
Going to take a stab in the dark and guess that's "Did you mean to say 平成弐拾陸年?" in old Nip?
Knowing Chinese, I wonder how fucked up old Japanese is compared to its equivalent in Chinese. 古文 is some really fucked up shit.

>>100692390
Without people to learn Japanese you would have no translations for your precious anime and manga. You'd have to rely on Japanese people translating into English, and I don't think we need to give examples of why that's a bad idea.

>>100692390
I fucking love C, but calling it useful in modern day programming is a joke. It's an excellent tool for learning and for getting low level shit done, but more than likely you'll benefit much more from high level languages like C#, javascript, etc, depending on what you're building

I bet the people who struggle with Kanji just try to do rote memorization or something stupid like that. I learned my Kanji in batches of 10 - 15, mixed in with vocab lessons with plenty of compound words that used one or more of the kanji we were learning. We also had to learn to write them all by hand so we could memorize the radicals. After about 500 or so you have the radicals down and can easily acquire kanji from self study.

>>100691930
I've been studying for a year and two months and I do that all the time. I also spend much less time studying than what the posts at the DJT's lead to believe is the average for anons, but much more time doing reading practice too.

>>100692888
You should learn the grammar for everything on the card you don't understand, which is usually nothing, or in some cases one thing. Also, reschedule words used in cards because the order is retarded sometimes.

>>100692888>Okay, so I have been using the Core 2K pack for Anki and I have been treated to relatively nonsensical imagaic memorization.
I take it you don't know shit about the language?
Do you want to learn Japanese, or a group of characters? Learn to say something and then see how it's written, dude.

>>100692956You can learn to recognize words by sight without ever writing them. Studying kanji alone is demoralizing and the benefits aren't that great.
Or just do it later after you've got a bunch of vocab and grammar under control where it will actually benefit you. Nothing wrong with not being able to write for awhile if you can read.

After that start reading a grammar guide like Tae Kim's Japanese guide, Genki, or Japanese the Manga way. Once you can form basic sentences download Anki and the Core 2k or 10k decks and start building vocabulary while you keep reading the grammar guides. Continue until you are fluent.

>>100692956
No, just hiragana and katakana, plus vocabulary of course.
Kanji can come later. Learning with just the basics can get you somewhat far reading comprehension wise, like some kiddie 4komas, but these days a lot of shounen tier stuff is readable, too.

>>100692956
You don't learn a language piecemeal, that's fucking retarded. You start out with basic grammar, rote memorization of a few sentences so you can get the grasp of the rhythm and cadence of the language. Then you look at how those basic sentences are constructed, the verbs and nouns that go into them, and how they look written out.

In the very beginning you use romaji, roman letters for the Japanese words, but you want to move on from that as soon as possible so you don't get used to it. You should begin learning kana in the first week, alongside your basic grammar, gradually replacing the romaji with hiragana.

It is important to practice writing them by hand, you will remember them much better this way. It also helps if you have a tutor or somebody who knows the language to critique your handwriting or you will never improve. Learning to write the kana and writ them properly speeds up the memorization process greatly and makes retention much higher. Learn hiragana first, then katakana.

Intensive kanji lessons should wait until you have kana down, but there's no harm in picking up the numbers and other really simple stuff along the way.

Always practice correct stroke order, and practice writing things out and speaking aloud, it helps you remember. Just reading stuff in a book or off a screen won't stay in your head as well.

>>100692881>gutter trash that Brazil speaks
Those are fighting words. Portuguese is a fine language, much superior to it's dumbed down version, Spanish. Just because our country is populated by retarded monkeys doesn't mean our language is shit.

>>100693211
It took me two years to the point where I'd consider grinding kanji by themselves beneficial. And even then I'd extract all the kanji from something I struggled to read and only learn those, not random kanji from a list of what's most common.

80% of the kanji I actually recognize now are smut kanji, like body parts and sex actions.

>You can rush through a hiragana and katakana deck in a day and everything after that is just setting aside 10 minutes for the daily reviews. >Do 50 kanji a day and only pay attention to the meanings, you will learn the readings far easier when you do vocab and can hear them in the context of actual sentences. You can easily finish the 2,136 jōyō in about 40 days and after that you just do the daily reviews.>Start doing a vocab deck like Core10k. 25 cards a day while you're still doing new kanji and then push it up to 50 new cards once you are just doing kanji reviews. You will be learning about 1,500 words a month.>Start reading through a few chapters a day of a grammar book like Genki. You will be finished in less than 40 days.>Start mining your way through games or manga once you have a decent understanding of grammar.

This isn't hard at all. It takes a few hours a day and anyone can do it if they put their mind to it. If you're too apathetic or lazy to be able to study for several hours a day, which is practically nothing, then just take pills.

The whole "it's difficult" excuse for not learning Japanese is bullshit when you can easily get a huge chunk of language out of the way within a little over a month.

>>100693402
That's terrible. You should immediately practice the kana you know. Only shit guides rely on rote memorization for everything, that's not a good way to remember anything. You need to continually apply the language as much as possible. Speak it and write it every day if you can.

>>100693469>50 Kanji a day
Holy shit son, I'm taking an upper-level Japanese Reading Development course in college and we only go through about 100 Kanji every other week, and even then long-term retention is an issue. That's pretty intense

>>100693170>Studying kanji alone is demoralizing and the benefits aren't that great
It's better than studying with retards who give up at the first sign of trouble. God, I fucking hated taking Japanese courses. There's nothing worse than having to slow down for other people who don't care/don't get it.

I was very lucky that the first professor I had for Japanese was extensively knowledgeable AND polylingual (neither JP nor English being her first languages), and she took the time to not only carefully explain things like stroke order, she even provided imagery meanings/derivations for each of them.

>>100693432
That's the thing, we actually have had out fair share of great writers and poets, and Portuguese sounds really nice when spoken properly. Maybe I'm too biased because it's my native language, but it really is a good language for poetry and singing. It's extremely versatile because it allows fiddling with sentence order and it just sounds pretty when done right.

>>100693873
Same here. I could probably do the translation but I can't typeset for shit, let alone clean or redraw the raws. There's no way I'd release a shitty scanlation typeset in MSPaint when I demand better of other scanlation groups, so I just do nothing.

>>100693589>I can program in 5 languages though if that means anything.
Well, sadly it doesn't. Programming languages are pure logic, you don't get the fancy cover that is vocabulary, and in this case kanji.
Trying to memorize kanji before learning the language is stupid.

2,136 kanji is nothing, with or without drugs. Drugs don't even help you learn faster, they just make you less lazy.

There's nothing hard about Japanese. Building up your vocabulary is a bit of a grind and that's a long-term goal, but it's not difficult. Going through the jōyō though? It's incredibly easy.

It's baby shit, honestly. Assuming that you're not learning the readings and you're waiting to do that when you learn vocab then going through the kanji is nothing more than a slightly more different and abstract version of what they do to babies when they hold up the picture of the cow and ask the baby to say what it is.

>>100693597>If you're serious about learning Japanese, just take a class.
Sure, if he wants to go at extra easy modo and never really be able to read anything that's not tailored for students before at least 3 years, that's a choice.

>>100693873
Pretty much the only thing keeping me from trying my hand at freelance translation is my lack of kanji recognition. I can read almost entire pages of untranslated manga, but it's the one or two kanji I don't recognize on every page or other page that keeps me from it, but really I just need to stop being a lazy shit and crack the kanji study tools I have at my disposal.

What went wrong?
Why is she so perfect?
Who X here?
Would you a X?
Discuss
Everyday until X
Daily Reminder
You will never mumble mumble
Mumble mumble Prove me wrong - You can't
You have X seconds to mumble mumble - You can't
What does X's Y smell like?
How do we fix X?
X a Y
Which X would you Y?
/a/ suddenly hates x
Why is X the only studio willing to take risks?
About to watch X what should I expect?
Don't mind me, I'm just posting mumble mumble.>There are people on /a/ right now who mumble mumble
What the fuck happened?
Mumble mumble when?
What's wrong with VLC?
Wake up, see this. What do?
I'll just leave this here
What's your excuse for not watching X
X will save anime / I'm here to save anime
What does /a/ think about X?
What's the most boring anime you've ever watched?
X is Love
Is X worth watching?
I had so high hopes for this series, but it just gets worse and worse with every new episode.
yfw x wins da y
Mumble mumble thread? Mumble mumble thread
What the fuck did I just watch?
X confirmed for Y
Why do you still watch moeshit?
She sees your dick
We want the X audience
Which anime has the worst fanbase?
Your waifu's face when X
It's time.
Your waifu is now X, do you still love her?
Was it rape, /a/?
Weekend waifu drawthread
All your waifus are wonderful, /a/
You should be able to solve this
Let's get a X thread going
Do X if your waifu is posted
ITT: overrated shit
What an utterly useless power
Date-a-live? More like date a slut am I right?
*sip*

>50 kanji a day and you'll be fucked if you can remember 5 of them next week.

What's your learning method? Do you just look at the kanji, write them a million times in some notebook, and then throw it out the window and never look at them again?

Of course you won't remember anything like that. Hell, if you have the time and the patience then you could do 100 or 200 kanji a day. As long as you're willing to do that massive pile of 800+ reviews then you will retain it. This is the whole point of spaced repetition systems like Anki. It just forms a schedule of bombarding you with reviews until you retain it.

You can't remember anything by just doing it once or twice. You need to see it continuously throughout the week in the form of constant reviews.

>>100694023>Assuming that you're not learning the readings
So you don't actually learn the kanji. You couldn't use them in any practical manner, you can just point them out on a card and give one or two meanings they have. That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Memorizing kanji meanings before learning anything about the language is ridiculous and you will retain nothing useful. Hell without even learning the radicals or readings you have nothing useful to retain in the first place. What horseshit.

>>100693589
Dont listen to >>100693981 .
I took a course in python 101 at my university last year, and it was hell. It is a language. There is a lot to keep track of . Props to programming bro for being able to keep track of that shit times 5.

>>100690377>I learned Spanish to talk to the people who shit on my lawn>I didn't learn Japanese to enjoy Anime, manga, games, doramas, websites, and everything else
Japanese is like the 7th most spoken language in the world, as if that mattered, and has plenty of possible and attractive applications. Some people don't get that.>>100690736
Nice "Japanese" there pal.

>>100694091
I can't even use shitty photoshop knockoffs, the UI is too complicated to bother with. There's no way I could handle actual photoshop and its magical tools.

>>100694204
I know, I just can't use them. There's not exactly a curriculum out there that teaches you this shit, you have to do it on your own, and I am not artistically inclined at all except when it comes to language.

>>100693469
This is bullshit. It's not difficult, it's time consuming. You need a lot of motivation, and if you lack that you aren't going to go anywhere. Not everyone has a few hours to put off and study everyday.

>>100694234
The hell you talking about, man? Sorry, but I'm not a teenager. I don't care about telling people how I'm better than them.
Meaning, when I said it doesn't mean anything I meant it wouldn't help him understand how to learn other natural languages, not that I'm better than him because his efforts in learning to program were in vain.

>>100694200>Hell, if you have the time and the patience then you could do 100 or 200 kanji a day.
No you couldn't. You would not be able to retain even 10% of those kanji after a single day. It would take at least a week to gain basic usage of at last 50. But your method of "learning" is nothing of the sort, you just memorize meanings and claim you have "learned" the kanji despite not knowing how it is read or written, or any words it is used in.

>>100694067
I was translating within two years of my first class. It's all about effort in the end, but classes keep you motivated and busy in the beginning and make sure you don't wind up with embarrassing gaps in your basic knowledge.

>>100694113
It slows me down too. Nukige is nice because I can copy/paste unknown kanji in an instant. With images it's much harder and I have to use a combination of two sites to really get it.

http://www.nihongodict.com/
http://jisho.org/

>>100694170
I get like $30 for an image set that's 30-50 pages. And each page has an average 300 characters on it. In an ideal world (ie, if I was working with professionals instead of amateurs) I'd be getting $120-$150 per set.

I wouldn't even be doing it if I could get paid for the nukige I already translated. It's a $4700 payday but I can't get the company that owns the license to respond to my emails.

>>100693977>>100693873
Protip: Most scanlation groups will gladly pick up a manga if you offer raws. Give them a translation and they'll be even more willing to, as long as they actually like it.
Find a group that's not working on a million titles and shoot them an email. Some even mention if they're taking requests or not.

Programming languages are more than just logic. There is definitely an equivalent to grammar and vocabulary in programming. Programming in different languages can require an entirely different way of thinking. It can be a real struggle.

>>100694489>jisho.org
I have the fucking search tool built into my FF. It has been my friend for a while. It's things like manga pages and video games (from which I cannot copy-paste) that fuck me up hard.

Still, I have played entire games and fully understood the story and most of the characters without any sort of translation, assistance, or research.

On the offhand, do you happen to know any apps you can get where you can write the kanji and it searches the dictionary for you? That would be excellent for my tablet, and a few people in my JP classes had things like that, but I never really bothered to ask at the time.

Attempting to memorize the readings for each individual kanji is insane and fairly useless. You're trying to remember huge amounts of completely out of context information for each kanji and there's very little reward for it.

Do you think that you're some kind of computer that can open up some random Japanese book, look at a bunch of kanji, and immediately your brain will pull up all of the different on'yomi and kun'yomi reading combinations for you? It doesn't work like that, and even if it did then it's still useless because you don't know what the words actually mean, even if you can guess at how they're read.

This is why it's best to learn readings in the context of vocabulary, otherwise you're just wasting your time. Learning the meanings is helpful because it familiarizes you with kanji in a very quick and easy way, allowing you to then move onto vocab study, see familiar kanji and have a rough idea of what they usually mean, and then easily form mnemonics to aid with memorizing vocab. It eliminates the "moon rune syndrome" that westerners seem to have where they can't distinguish between multiple different kanji and it all just looks like crazy scribbles.

That's the only point of doing individual kanji study and that's why it's so easy and takes very little time. The real time consuming aspect is learning vocab. If you're pissing away years on kanji and trying to memorize all of these different readings without the context of vocab then it's going to take you a decade to get any where.

>>100694676
Chinese is first by population I think (like that fucking matters with all of the different dialects that border on entirely different languages), English is definitely first by number of countries.

I speak English and French. I can read and write French, but I've been learning for damn near 7 years now and it's still hard. How the fuck do you faggots learn Japanese so easily? Or do you all lie about your proficiency? After all these years of French lessons, learning at the level of native speakers I still make silly mistakes in my French, although spoken French is quite top-tier. I demoralizes me when I consider learning Japanese because I dont want to embark on a 10 year journey to sound like a faggot gaijin.

>>100694801>Attempting to memorize the readings for each individual kanji is insane and fairly useless.
Except that's what it means to learn the kanji you immense tool. If you can't read them or write them out, you have not learned them. Not in any sense have you learned them. That's why your "learn 100 kanji a day" is complete horse shit. All you're doing is word association, you aren't learning shit.

Real learning for kanji involves accompanied vocab lessons, writing practice, and integration with your daily writing and reading practice (where you actually read the sentence aloud and retain the information, not just mindlessly parroting sounds or skimming for information).

> visit this oriental food place fairly often > run by this old Japanese lady > kind of build up a rapport with her/practice Japanese on her whenever I get milk coffee > she's only like fifty, not too bad looking > one day she acts a little weird > as she's giving me change she holds onto the bill and looks right into my eyes, smirking > finally lets go and winks

>>100690157>Not worth it
You just didn't realize its benefits.>>100692419>Fit those round pegs into square holes for two thousand years because kids can pick up any esoteric language
For a part of its history, Japanese was written with just kanji (which came into use around the 5th-6th centuries in Japan) that represent sounds. It later evolved into katakana and later hiragana.
Manyogana (万葉仮名), that is. Nihon shoki (日本書紀) and Manyoshu (万葉集) were both written with it.
Read this page over the charm of kanji if you want to understand why its beneficial and interesting to the language.
http://contest.japias.jp/tqj2005/80019/main_kanji-charm.html

>watch the minimum 2400 hours of anime to post on /a/ instead of lurking>take a few years of japanese class>grind kanji properly so you can read better fap material>spend 2-3 hours daily on it since it's your hobby

It's not hard to learn something if you spend 2+ hours on it every day. Even just watching anime helps a little. I promise you if you put that much time into learning French, you'd be as good as a native.

>>100692411>A baby boy was killed after a school girl found him alone in a lift and then allegedly thew him off a balcony.
CCTV footage in the lift shows as his mother was wheeling out his small green bike from the lift the doors abruptly shut.>Seconds before the 10-year-old girl entered the lift and picked up Yuanyuan as the door started to close as his frantic mother sets the bike down.>The grainy black and white footage shows the schoolgirl, who is wearing a backpack, holding the child for a few seconds before slamming him into the ground.>As he struggles to get back up she repeatedly kicks him, hits him and stamps on him.>When the lift doors open on the 25th floor she is seen grabbing Yuanyuan off the metal floor and pushing him out.
Chinese school girls aren't very cute.>The bodies of 21 babies, some with hospital identification tags around their tiny ankles, washed ashore on a river in eastern China and two mortuary workers were detained for allegedly dumping them.>News footage Tuesday showed the babies — at least one of whom was stuffed in a yellow plastic bag marked "medical waste" — strewn along a dirt riverbank near a highway overpass. A few wore diapers. All were caked in mud
Chinese women shitting in the street:
Chinese woman shitting in the street while concealing
(http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=76e_1381600215)
Woman finishes shitting alone on subway platform within 10 seconds
(http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=251_1369221946)

Too pointy. It's completely dislocated from where it should be on the writing space. That little line being parallel with the extremity of the lower line is in very poor taste. I don't think you did this in 3 stroke like you should.

>>100695181
My japanese sensei used to hit on me all the time, in the middle of class. It was awkward as hell but she went easy on me for speaking portions so it was nice. It was in the early morning, too, so she'd trick me into saying lewd things in front of everyone.

>>100694847
Fuck French. I studied in a french institute for 15 years and I still had a ton of grammatical errors, my wording was poor, and I had trouble expressing myself verbally. Every single class was in French, my homework was in French, there were a ton of kids and teachers who only spoke French. All that exposure and I still can't watch French movies without subtitles, or read books without a dictionary. And fuck all those argo words, they sound terrible and I can't possibly learn them all without living in France.
And in the end I stopped using it once I got out of high school. I don't even buy all those French translated manga because I fucking hate the language.
Fuck you France.

>>100694847
Not sure about the others, but I don't, at all. This is fucking hell sometimes and my mind hurts a LOT after I finish writing 20 kanji, each one of them 20 times, while trying to make sure the proportions stay consistent. Not counting the other 1~2 hours I spend doing my vocabulary reps, and the other 2~3 hours I spend reading VNs, and 1 hour watching anime, and also half an hour adding cards to my vocab deck (I build one based on the words I encounter which I don't know in VNs). Not only that, but no matter how I try, my grammar is still mediocre~half-decent. Maybe I should try thinking harder.

>>100695449
I had to take two years regardless to get my degree, so I took the easiest two years. Also, my first "year" was an accelerated summer course with 10 weeks of 3 hour classes every single day. It was fun.

>>100695524
I didn't say one should watch anime to learn Japanese. I'm saying it helps. And it's how lots of /a/nons get started.

Alternatively, you could just do a vocab deck and mine through reading material that you actually enjoy, rather than sitting in some classroom for years and getting jewed out of all your money while your teachers stretches out the learning material with mind-numbing exercises and writing drills for as long as they possibly can.

What do you think happens when you learn new vocab through a vocabulary deck? You attempt to read the example sentence and on the answer side you see the english definition and translation, the reading written out with furigana for the kanji used within the vocab, you hear an audio recording of both the word and the sentence, etc.

It's the most efficient way to learn the readings and actual vocab, but the best part is that you don't lose thousands of dollars by wasting your time in one of those "Japanese courses" that colleges create to con stupid weeaboos out of their money.

>>100695846
Although I think one can also learn kanji by writing them out (without need to pay for classes since jisho is there for you), I agree with you that the best way to learn vocabulary and even incorporate kanji into your daily life is through an anki deck for that purpose (be it a core deck or a custom one). However, I am considering taking classes so I can ask the teacher some questions regarding grammar and perhaps improve my oral skills.

>>100695846
Again: you're not learning shit because your learning is not comprehensive. It's rushed and focuses on just getting the barest gist of meaning and then moving on. You don't practice writing or speaking or integrated reading/writing for kanji and vocab. You don't do composition or oral presentations, you don't do conversation practice, you don't practice stroke order or learn the radicals alongside new kanji.

You just memorize meanings devoid of any proper context and call that "learning" a kanji despite not actually learning anything useful with respect to the actual language.

Vocabulary decks similarly will not teach you anything besides bare memorization if you do not incorporate them into daily reading, speaking, and composition practice.

You people who do nothing but stare at a screen all day and think you've learned jack shit are an embarrassment. I'd wager you couldn't even hold a simple conversation with a native speaker.

>>100695788>>100695850
FUCKING THIS. Holy shit, I was an enthusiastic scholar in my youth, so when they told me "You'll need French to get a job!" I worked my ass off at it, now I never use it and hardly even remember the time I wasted in those classes that could have been put toward something useful.

>>100695871
Sometimes when words are formed their syllables change sound. So Ko+Koe = Kogoe(小声). The same thing might happen with a word that begins with a ち or a つ. For example, you have 身近 formed from 近い, so 身近 should be written as みぢか and not みじか. In the same way you have 気づく formed from つく so you can't write it as 気ずく.

>>100696047
You're deluding yourself if you think most /a/nons feel the need of being able to keep up a conversation with a native speaker. I'd wager most people here want to learn the language for the sake of their hobbies, and believe it or not, staring at a screen for 1~2 hours while learning a bunch of new words everyday CAN accomplish that (though I do believe that kanji should be learned separately).

>>100696047
Why do you assume no one who does RtK does the rest of that? We're a vicious community that rends the best method for things by the sheer fact that we're not banned for disagreeing with some fuckwith who happens to have 100000 posts.

Vocab decks just keep the information in your head until you need it, which isn't often enough for it to stick otherwise.

>>100695739
You expect me to respond in French? Well fuck you.
I lived in South America all my life, so outside of school I just spoke Spanish. But still, I should be more fluent after all those years.
Well as long as you like it I guess you'll do alright. Being surrounded by frenchies will make it easier.

>>100696177
You can't hold a simple conversation because you are inept at the language. You have a fragmented half-assed mastery of kanji and vocabulary because you did nothing but stare at a computer screen and learned it all piecemeal instead of in a steady stream. Your reading and retention of Japanese is forever stunted below anybody who actually bothered to learn the language properly.

>>100696160
My only worry is that I've learned at this point more than 1100 kanji and my vocabulary is (supposedly) at 1k words at the moment, so I feel like I'll end up seeing a lot of things I already know in the beginning of the course. Maybe I'll learn a lot of different things, though, since my learning methods are completely different from those in classes.

>>100696296
I'm not that anon who said kanji should be learned via vocabulary. I do write them everyday and take a look at example sentences for each one of them I'm not familiar with, and I also talk with japanese speakers in a regular routine. Relying in a single method is a really bad idea, so I actually bother doing other things, but in no way anon is required to learn kanji with all those accompaniments you're listed. Also, there is no "proper way". Just that some methods are faster than others, and such methods really depend on each person.

>>100696280
The Kanji are actually irrelevant for this. I'll rewrite it in Kana for you.

Sometimes when words are formed their syllables change sound. So Ko(こ)+Koe(こえ) = Kogoe(こごえ). The same thing might happen with a word that begins with a ち or a つ. For example, you have みぢか formed from み and ちかい, so みぢか should be written as みぢか and not みじか. In the same way you have きづく formed from き and つく so you can't write it as きずく even though the pronunciation would be the same.

>>100696218>vocab decks just keep the information in your head
No they don't. Rote memorization is a animal trick. Even parrots can recite your precious vocabulary back to you, and some birds probably can memorize words faster than you can. You aren't learning shit if you aren't getting grammatical context and aren't practicing it in your speaking and writing. A vocab list is useful for a reference sheet at best, the actual learning comes from application in reading and writing. Composing sentences and practicing speech are a hundred times more effective for remembering Japanese than staring at a screen.

>>100696050
Christ, yes. I haven't even put any effort towards studying Japanese and I'm pretty sure I'm about as good at it as French, despite having taken the latter all through school. And I've actually made use of the former.

>>100696463
We went to Montreal and the only places we interacted with people were all English. I tried speaking French to people and it just turned out awkward.

>>100696478
The point I'm getting at is there is no way to actually learn 100 kanji in a single day like he claims. There is no way he can retain that many kanji even in a week. He's spouting bullshit.

>>100696406
I've read Tae Kim, but didn't bother with Genki. Is it worth my time, or is the former guide more than enough?>>100696451
Regarding words, I agree, but as for kanji it doesn't work the same way, since I've accidentally learned them in a roundabout way. I used to have a kanji damage deck, and I went to travel once and my reps accumulated so I gave up on the method, and switched for handwriting. And I must admit it works much better than starting at the screen, since it makes me fall asleep very frequently.

>>100696463
A similar thing happened to me with the grade 6 trip, but it wasn't related to French.

French classes were a joke too, especially the further in we got. By Grade 12, students weren't even making an effort to speak to the teacher in French, even though it was Immersion, the highest level you can get.

>>100696616
I consider myself better at Japanese than French and I didn't start studying it until post-Secondary. I can still listen to French, but I doubt I could read it very well at this point.

>there are people on /a/ right now who aren't learning Japanese RIGHT NOW
What with the establishment of the DJT threads, you have no decent excuse to not be doing it. It's what's going to be separating the wheat from the chaff in the time to come. You can already see it starting to happen and use of Japanese has grown on the board from what it used to be.

>>100696690
That's true. I hate people who think this and it's really stupid to just say "HEY GUYS I'VE LEARNED ALL KANJI IN 2 MONTHS BY USING RTK AND CORE 2K, AND NOW I'M READING VNs AFTER 6 MONTHS OF STUDYING!" I seriously wonder how much shit they make up to feel better about themselves.

Here's my honest opinion on the whole moon speak thing.
If you're in fact a die-hard otaku at heart who loves reading unedited versions of manga, anime, or VN, then learning moon speak is definitely something worth doing. But some people don't here don't value those as much as others.
Yeah, learning Japanese is nice but there really is no point other than to satisfy all your otaku desires. I read manga and VNs as a side hobby but not to the extension that I would want to learn the language for the sole purpose of experiencing those things fully.
That's just my opinion, now if you'll excuse me, I need to get my riot shield for all the hate I'm about to receive.

>You don't do composition or oral presentations, you don't do conversation practice

The first problem with this is that you assume that anyone here even gives a shit about talking to Nips. There are probably less five people in this entire thread who are interested in Japanese for anything other than consuming Japanese products.

The second problem though is that you're yet again wasting your money for a subpar education. Oh boy, paying thousands of dollars for conversation practice where you get to talk to a bunch of weeaboos who are equally as inept as you are. If you really want to talk to Japanese people and improve your conversation skills then the best idea is to get out of that classroom as fast as you possibly can and start practicing with actual Japanese natives over skype. There are thousands of them, they love to do language exchange practicing, and it's free. They're every where. You will learn far more from that than you would have learned from the weeaboo circlejerk that is Japanese college courses. What you're doing right now is nothing more than the blind leading the blind.

>Vocabulary decks similarly will not teach you anything besides bare memorization if you do not incorporate them into daily reading>if you do not incorporate them into daily reading

Anyone teaching themselves Japanese through programs like Anki is already spending hours on "daily reading practice" each day, but they don't call it daily reading practice because they're actually having fun and they're reading through games, manga, or VNs that they love. It might be hard for you to understand, but there are many ways to learn a language that don't involve sitting in a classroom and reading painfully generic practice stories off a worksheet.

>>100696810
こ becomes ご. It's not that complicated. Get used to it cause that's pretty much the standard in jukugo. I'd say that half of them have some form of alteration like that. It flows easier during speech like that if you want to know why they do it.

>>100696690>The point I'm getting at is there is no way to actually learn 100 kanji in a single day like he claims.
I agree, unless you're some kind of savant.>There is no way he can retain that many kanji even in a week.
Hey, that's 15 a day. That's doable. I did 15 a day when I had the motivation, and I'm pretty sure I still remember them.

I've never heard of someone putting in years of work at Japanese only to say "oh wait, I don't really care as much as I thought I did". If you don't have some kind of passion inside of you, you are going to fizzle out after a point.

>>100696841
I could live without learning Japanese if I only watched anime and read translated VN.

I can't live without knowing Japanese after tasting the forbidden fruit that is nukige (porn VN). Holy shit, EVERY kink is covered, multiple times. The art+voice acting+writing is SUPERB. Since learning Japanese my fap session quality has skyrocketed.

Also it's nice to watch anime raw when subs are slow, or read manga that's untranslated.

>>100696782
You keep calling things different things so you sound right, but haven't really said anything of any value at all. It's disheartening to know that someone so skilled at moonspeak such as yourself is what natives are forced to experience.

>>100696841
I used to care about talking with japanese people and learning about their culture, but throughout my one year of self-studies, only my desire to read untranslated VNs is left. The worst part is that the harder works will take me many more years to read decently ;_; it's kinda disappointing... but since I've been through so much, I can't give up now.

>>100696841
I think you can't really say whether something is worth it or not until you've done it yourself and have experienced the gain. Learning Japanese will give you the opportunity to enjoy a lot of other things that you probably had no previous knowledge or interest in. You can't preemptively really say that it's not worth it until you've done it.

>>100696841
I don't hate you anon. As you said, there's no point for me in learning Japanese other than satisfying my otaku desires. Well, I personally enjoy learning the language in itself too, it's pretty fun.

>>100697034
First year uni classes over one summer, then another three quarters for the second year of classes. Then I spent a year NEET with 3+ hours every day reading raw nukige and watching another 2 hours of anime.

The course websites are here:
http://www.hnet.uci.edu/eastasian/japanese/class_websites/index.php

>>100697227
Not exactly, because my desire to be reading them is still here. I have no reason to abandon it, because I know that people who also shared the same desire as me had to go through this long road. For me, to know that I'll be able to reach what I desire after so much hard work is more than enough to motivate me to go keep going.

>>100697353
Context. Which is a really amazing thing because I still watch shit and while understanding all the words, I wonder how the fuck anybody understands what anyone means with all their vague bullshit.

>>100697377>>100697126
It's not that bad usually. It has a low-tide and high-tide for shitposting levels and a lot of time a lot of really good discussion happens and you'll be able to pick up on a lot and get a lot of help. Even I'll get tired of it every once in a while but when I come back I'll always find it in a acceptable condition. The English-only community seems far worse if you ask me and I hardly like to venture out into /a/ at this point because you guys just don't understand things to really enjoy them correctly, as silly as that may sound.

>>100697441
Telepathy. They are bred to be so part of the community that they automatically know what everyone else is thinking. That's also why it's nearly impossible to understand anything when they turn up the Wa; shit is like encryption on their denpa.

>>100697565
Unless there are more natives than just the teacher, you're essentially paying money to be spoonfed at a snails pace and forced to listen to people who are worse than you prove how little they study.

Why would they want to sabotage their progress and learn at the pace of a retarded snail?

Being completely addicted to programs like anki is bad, but college is worse. College language courses, especially Japanese because the teachers are fucking terrible, are designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. You're basically in a special ed course.

>>100697691
If that's the point, then it's not a very good one. Knowing one romance language will give you a good edge on learning another. Particularly if it's between Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

>>100697691
As someone who speaks two Latin languages I can tell you that this is kind of dumb. The Latin languages between them are more similar than any particular one in regards to Latin. People study Latin to study their ancestors.

>>100697377
I look at those threads and I am also taking a class.
The class is so slow compared to what a motivated individual can do on their own. Once I've learned something, I still have to wait around and do worksheets and skits and take a test on it instead of moving on and learning more.

The only upsides would be forced learning if motivation gets low, and having a native speaker teach the class so you can hear how to use the proper pitch accents and talk back and whatnot so you don't sound wrong or like a total robot when you speak.

>>100697565
I think they're a waste of money, but I never took them. Some people say they are good for motivation, but that's just basically guilting yourself into having to study since you already spent the money anyway, which is retarded.

>>100697535
The problem is that you literally can not ask for anything without getting 30 replies of "read the fucking guide".
I could understand for common shit like 'how do I learn katakana?' but Jesus...

>>100697770
The challenge of Japanese isn't comprehending the grammatical structure, it's rewiring your brain to comprehend information in the way Japanese presents it, which is completely backwards to how we have used it all our lives.

>>100697932
I don't know about others here, but I make my own anki deck and add words I encounter in VNs/manga/LNs that I don't know. It seems to be working fairly well. Also, I learned kanji beforehand.

>>100697937>The problem is that you literally can not ask for anything without getting 30 replies of "read the fucking guide".
If we tell you it's in the guide, then it's in the guide.
Any non-super-beginner question will not be shot down like that. I understand that you might find it annoying, but the information will be there in the guide if you got that response, I promise you.

>>100697565
I know they get shit on but I'm taking one in Uni and it is pretty nice. The teacher is native, and the majority of the people in the class aren't the neckbeards /a/ would leave you to believe they would be (more than 75% of my class is asian).

>>100697597
It's more like wanting to learn rugby, but only one position and not paying any attention to what the other players are doing. To get the most out of what you want to do, you have to go beyond it or you're missing out on crazy lust with the hot neighbor because all you wanted to do was fap.

>>100698133
It's not difficult, but I think it's definitely one of the aspects of Japanese that takes the most time and effort. What's nice though is that it doesn't really have to be learned so much as vigorously trained.

>>100698133
You're making me feel dumb now, anon. Maybe I am, but I look at example sentences and read untranslated VNs (currently only simple ones like moege and nukige) yet my brain still isn't able to get used to the grammar. ;_;

Is it really useful to straight up learn 200 or so Kanji? What does it even help? As far as I can tell most vocabulary have nothing to do with the kanji they are made up of, unless I'm very mistaken. I guess, I just want to know the uses of straight up learning kanji to english word like what Heisig's has you do.

>>100698274
It's like learning chinese in 2 months so you know a keyword and how to write 2000 or so kanji. Anything beyond that is outside of the scope of RtK and the like. Putting sound and meaning to symbols you already know is much easier, and arguably faster overall than doing the whole process for every word without it.

>>100698227>>100698257
I just took an LN VERY early on, before I knew more than 500 Kanji even, and read it all as fast as I could not caring to understand everything that was written, just doing my best to decipher each sentence and moving on if I could understand the gist of what was happening in the story. Did wonders for me.

>>100698045>>100698066
I've never asked a question in that thread.
I know a couple people who know the language, so I ignore that thread and their guide.
I just find it silly that you can only actually discuss specific things without that spam.

>>100698538
I'd recommend either Heisig or Kanjidamage, but only if you feel inclined to write. I was trying to get across that it does very few things, but does them very well. Not everyone needs the foundation it provides, but just being able to recognize and write almost everything you come across from day one feels amazing. There's still learning actual vocab, but knowing the symbols that vaguely represent it is way easier than doing it all at once.

I went to Japan for a few months for classes and while I was there bought up the first volumes of some kiddie stuff (Shin-chan, Yotsuba, Azumanga, some shonenshit). I can't fully comprehend most yet, but I get the idea and phrase patterns are becoming more obvious

>>100698278
That's bad, but I'd think it is understandable... but I sent something a little better to Toranoana asking about a package that got delivered to the wrong address in Japan and here's what I got.

They will respond to you more than fluently; they will respond the same way they would respond to a fellow eleven: in formal Japanese. I hope you can figure out keigo.
平素より、とらのあな通信販売をご利用頂き、誠にありがとうございます。

DO NOT TAKE JAPANESE CLASS IN COLLEGE unless you know your hiragana and katakana by heart.
When I was all full-blown weaboo and shit, I studied and practiced writing the hiragana and katakana ON MY OWN before I graduated high school. For me it took me 3 months to fully master the kana's. When I got to college i breezed through JPN elementary level and all I had to worry about was trying to fully comprehending the grammar (particles and sentence/order structure that's compared to English) and kanji (I hate them... Koreans can make do without their kanji (hanja) but Japanese will be a broken language without the 'Ji's) so I can get an A+ and impress my QT little sensei-chans (seriously, my instructors from elementary to intermediate were of almost loli physique relative to mine!)

>it's cheaper, but still about a grand or more per quarter>per quarter

With that money you could hire a Japanese person to talk to you for 4+ hours a day and correct everything you say and still have hundreds of dollars to spare.

How does the school convince anyone to waste their money on this and how do the students justify it? That's insane to spend over a thousand dollars a quarter for several years just to learn what will eventually amount to intermediate level Japanese.

I can't imagine. They would have to bring in a bunch of naked geisha girls every class and allowed the students to snort complementary coke off their asses while getting a handjob for it to be worth that kind of money.

My college charges the same rate for anything 12+ credits in a semester. So assuming you can handle the workload, taking a 5th, 6th, or 7th class in a semester only makes things cheaper for you, as they're essentially "free".

You can certainly learn Japanese without classes, but for many it helps to have the structured lessons and fire under your ass to come in regularly, have people to do dialogues with, etc.

>>100699667
We all learned a lot. And we learned really thoroughly. We had LOTS of speaking and listening practice every day, learned all the grammar thoroughly, basically everything about the language. We also learned a lot of Japanese culture and got lots of time outside of class to talk to the teachers if we wanted.

In my opinion it was well worth it, because it gave me a super solid foundation to build off of on my own.

>>100699962>>100700014
I'm chinese, but I don't care about modern chinese culture. I only want to talk to my grandparents directly before they die, because they know almost no english. The chinese government no longer cares about the health of it's citizens, and they hinder their own culture because they're afraid of ideas and criticism. They do not deserve to rule, and I hate them.

If you're in a hurry, learn Chinese first, although listening practice is essential because of tones. Kanji and Han Zi are fairly similar in meanings, so learning one greatly helps in learning the other.